The Last Human (Zack Jordan)

The Last Human
Zack Jordan
Del Rey
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Sarya's whole life aboard the backwater ice mining station Water Tower has been a lie. Her mother, the eight-bladed death machine Shenya the Widow, is not her mother. Her intelligence tier, a mere 1.8, is not her true tested intelligence. And the species listed on her official registration is not her true birth species. If she were to list that, she'd be dead, because her true species is the most hated and feared in the whole Networked galaxy, the only species to attempt genocidal conquest, the only species in eons sentenced to utter extermination: the species known as Human.
As Sarya faces a future of dull, unassuming jobs that keep too much scrutiny from falling on her, she can't help chafing. She can't even get a Network implant like everyone else, lest the surgeon recognize what she is, making do with clunky prosthetics and a buggy old AI helper program obsessed with telling stories. Then a class visit to the station's restricted observation deck leads to a fateful encounter: two members of a rare non-Networked group intelligence known as Observer seem to recognize who, and what, Sarya is, and hint that they know where she came from... a story that Shenya the Widow has never revealed, claiming not to remember the circumstances of her discovery. The girl can't help but be curious - but it turns into a trap, one that destroys her home and family and thrusts her into an adventure she never prepared for, one that could lead her at long last to her own kind, or to the doom of the Networked galaxy itself.

REVIEW: One of the classic episodes of the show Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured a dubbed movie called Prince of Space, where a large portion of the dialog consisted of someone saying something and other people reacting in confusion and disbelief until someone repeated what was said again. At one point, as the onscreen characters once more express bafflement at being told they're supposed to enter a space capsule, riffing robot Tom Servo snaps and starts yelling the line at the screen,"EACH OF YOU WILL ENTER A SPACE CAPSULE!" I found myself thinking of that moment and that line many, many times as I listened to The Last Human, to date the first audiobook that prompted me to boost the playback speed in the hopes that maybe, that way, the story would get past its dithering and the repetitious denial or confusion of the main character and actually enter the proverbial space capsule.
It didn't start that way. In fact, it starts out with lots of potential and some decent humor, as the predatory spider-like Widow alien demonstrates the universality of motherly love toward her sullen teenage "daughter" Sarya, the relationship with by far the most heart - and one of the most heartbreaking - in the book. But cracks start to show early on, as when Sarya barely avoids abduction with the help of a rebellious AI habitation suit that tells her to run for it; when she stands around, staring at it in rather stupid disbelief at how it let her go, it amends its message to "I said run, idiot"... and it was a bad sign when I found myself nodding along with the sentiment. (Enter the space capsule, Sarya...) Eventually, she winds up in the company of the requisite band of vaguely legal misfits, plunged into a plot that drags her into the heart of the galaxy-spanning intelligence known as the Network and its ongoing rivalry with the myriad-bodied Observer intelligence, but I didn't really feel her connect with the newer characters with anything like the bond she had with Shenya the Widow, as they're all just out for themselves and she doesn't do much more than use them thoughtlessly when the opportunity arises, only to later inexplicably consider them close friends. Did I miss a few chapters? When were they ever anything but acquaintances of circumstance - especially Sandy, the tier-3 intelligence who also considers everyone else in the galaxy mere tools for her plans and whims? Then the story falls - at speeds rivaled by plate tectonics - into metaphysical musings about what makes a species, what rights an intelligence has innately versus what responsibilities it has to its fellow entities, whether any individual or even species even matters set against intergalactic scales of intelligences to whom all else are mere cells of the greater body... And all the while, Sarya continuously and persistently stands around, expresses disbelief, and has to have things repeated to her, and even then generally has to be pushed and shoved and manipulated to actually do anything. The ending leaves the airlock wide open for a sequel, on top of it, so it doesn't even end with a solid conclusion (though it does pretty much say that life in the galaxy is no story, so there is no ending or no real point from the perspective of a mere individual, so maybe this lack of closure was intentional).
There were some decent ideas here or there, and moments that clicked on their own. I wanted to like it. But at some point, I just found myself there with Tom Servo in my mind, shouting at someone to please, for the love of the "Goddess" Sarya repetitiously swore to, get in the danged space capsule...

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